Steven Spielberg is, for many, if not the all time greatest director working in American film than at least the best living today. His career has showcased his talents in a wide range of genres. He’s made horror, comedy, historic drama, war movies, biopics, crowdpleasing tentpoles, an autobiographical coming-of-age story, sci-fi, and even a musical. He’s a man who has constantly honed his craft, and there are few of his films that I have seen, even the ones I didn’t care for much, that I would ever call boring. And to date, I think it is safe to say his masterpiece, the one that finally showed he could do something really adult and serious, is 1993’s Schindler’s List, the story of how Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jewish lives in the middle of World War II. As I noted the first time I covered this film, every trick Spielberg knew and cultivated over his career was put to use here, along with a few new ones, to make a story that hits with a real emotional punch.
If I didn’t do a challenge like this, I would never watch it again, and that’s due entirely to how good this film is.
Now, I said something similar about never revisiting a film outside of a challenge like this back when I wrote up Gone with the Wind. The difference there is a simple one: I am not all that impressed by Gone with the Wind. As I said about that film back in August, the only way for me to feel any real sympathy for the plight of Scarlett O’Hara is to find her situation somehow tragic, but Scarlett is an awful woman who doesn’t really learn to be much of a better one over the film’s long runtime. Gone with the Wind, for me, is a film that hasn’t aged well. That is very much not the case for Schindler’s List. I very much find the characters in this one, the ones that weren’t loyal Nazis, very sympathetic. Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is very much a changed man by the end of the film. A fellow who didn’t want to deal with a grateful one-armed man at the start of the film and is largely indifferent to people’s feelings is last seen having a breakdown when he stops to think how many more lives he might have saved if he’d just sold more of his personal property even as the Jews he did save do their best to reassure him that he did everything he could. I have no idea how historically accurate that moment is, but I did learn when I read the historical novel this film is based on that Schindler wasn’t the only German businessman to save Jewish lives during the war. He was just the most successful at it.
No, the reason I don’t really want to watch Schindler’s List is more obvious: it’s a true story about an awful time in human history where a group of people decided another group of people didn’t deserve to be thought of as human beings anymore and deserved death. There are numerous other films that cover painful subjects that I have no desire to see, and not all of them are based on true stories. I understand Sophie Choice is excellent. I also know what it’s about. I’ve never seen it. Either version of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is not something I would rush out to see since it’s an indictment of violent cinema and the people who see such things, and I’d rather not be lectured by the very film I’m watching while I watch it for my filmwatching habits even if I think they have a good point. The trailers for Promising Young Woman made the film look too raw for my taste, and I find films centered around sexual assault, even the ones that do it “right” by showing how traumatic such things are, to be something I am generally not comfortable with and often avoid. And the more I find out about Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the less inclined I am to see it even if it is on my Fill-in Filmography.
All of that is to say that there are some films with subject matters that, quite frankly, I prefer not to subject myself to under most circumstances. Many times when I do finally see these films, I can recognize them for the fine work they are, and sometimes there’s often the case of something that isn’t as horrifying as I had been led to believe, such as Oldboy, or in one case, not as horrifying as I remembered once I got past the opening scene (that would be Saving Private Ryan). And, for the record, there are films that I won’t watch because, well, everything I know about them tells me they’re gross, that being the reason I will probably never watch a Human Centipede movie or many of the films directed by John Waters.
What makes Schindler’s List as potent as it is, though, is that the film isn’t making up what happened. The Holocaust was very real and claimed many lives all because some people decided they were better than others and then systematically went about eliminating as many people as possible who didn’t fit their criteria of “human”. Spielberg doesn’t pull any punches, and if the Germans in this film, represented best by Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Göth, seem too evil to be human, that’s part of the point. Even the Jews themselves had a hard time thinking things were going to get worse until they obviously did. Evil like this can and still does exist in the world. Most human beings aren’t like that. Most human beings seem to be hardwired against hurting other people, so ones who do somehow came to a conclusion that their “enemy” is somehow not human. It seems to be taught behavior and not something intuitive for most.
That’s actually what makes the cinematic Schindler such a good character: he does that in reverse. Oskar Schindler starts the film as a womanizer with so many side pieces that the doormen of his building assume Mrs. Schindler (who knows Schindler cheats on her) is just another one-night stand. Schindler’s interest in bringing in Jewish labor initially is to make a profit, and it is only over time that he comes to change his mind. He’s at first a freewheeling guy who joined the Nazi party for the business connections and doesn’t much care for anyone’s ideology. It’s only as he sees the horrors around him that he changes his mind, and it’s a believable change. Schindler actually sees the Jews as people for most of the film. He just doesn’t have much empathy for others regardless of their ethnicity to start. Contrast that to Göth, a man who goes to the noose a true-believer in his people’s own superiority, and you see a man becoming better to the point where Schindler is actually subtly sabotaging the war effort by the time the film is drawing to a close.
I noted the last time I wrote this film up that Spielberg’s moves here are sometimes rather subtle, but they aren’t always. The thing is, given the subject matter, they shouldn’t be. Spielberg doesn’t pull any punches, showing the Nazis rounding up Jews for the camps in Warsaw first and then later herding children onto trucks while their horrified parents watch their kids ride off, the children on the trucks seemingly oblivious to what’s happening while the ones that aren’t hide where they can, up to and including waist-deep in a latrine. These are not nor should they be easy scenes to watch, but for me, the part that always gets me is the end of the film when Spielberg switches back to full color and the survivors, together with the actors who played them in the film, place stones on Schindler’s grave. It’s a moment that hits me because it’s the final reminder that what the audience has just spent three hours watching was not a work of fiction no matter how seemingly ridiculously evil the Nazis in the film were. These events actually happened, and these people were the relatively small group that were lucky enough to live through it because, unlike Rhett Butler, Schindler actually realized he gave a damn.
NEXT: Well, that’s depressing. How about a three hour+ film that actually has something of a happy ending and the evil of the film is more symbolic than realistic? Be back soon when I cover the final part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy with 2003’s The Return of the King.
0 Comments